A small box bolted under a crane hook in Tel Aviv quietly became one of construction's most opinionated data sources. Then Insight Partners showed up with $80 million.
Walk onto a 40-story job site in Houston, Seattle or Brooklyn and tilt your head back. Past the rebar, past the men in vests, past the tarps flapping in the wind, there's a small black box riding under the crane hook. It is recording. It has been recording all morning. By the time the foreman finishes his coffee, it has counted the picks, measured the cycle time, identified the materials, flagged the idle minutes - and quietly emailed someone in a project office about a delay they don't yet know about.
That box is built by Versatile. The company doesn't make cranes. It doesn't build buildings. It built the thing that finally made the building tell on itself.
Construction is the second-largest industry on the planet and one of the least digitized. McKinsey has been ringing the productivity bell for years. Skyscrapers go up the way they did in 1962 - on whiteboards, walkie-talkies, gut, and superintendents who have memorized everyone's schedule.
Meirav Oren grew up inside that world. Her father was a contractor. Her brother worked the trade. She knew what a foreman knows by 9am: the schedule on the wall has very little to do with what is actually happening on the steel.
The traditional fixes - cameras on poles, drones overhead, RFID on materials - all stop at the perimeter of the job. They watch. They don't participate. Cranes, though, touch every load on a vertical build. Every steel beam, every concrete bucket, every bundle of rebar travels through the hook.
It sounds obvious in hindsight. Most good ideas do. The trick was that the hook had to swing without dropping anything, the box had to be lifted-load rated, and the AI had to learn the difference between a steel column and a window pallet from above, in any weather, with a swinging perspective. None of that was obvious.
Versatile was founded in 2016 by four people who, between them, had spent a long time around heavy industry and harder math: Meirav Oren, the construction insider; Barak Cohen, a CTO with a background in industrial computer vision; Danny Hermann, a product builder who liked the messy parts; and Ran Oren, who would carry the company into customer offices.
Their bet was unfashionable. While the rest of construction tech chased BIM software, drones, and dashboards-for-dashboards' sake, Versatile said the most valuable real estate in the industry was about twelve inches above a load. Investors initially nodded politely. Then the first pilot showed a project running 28% more efficient cycle time. The polite nodding stopped.
CEO. Grew up around contractors. Knows what a Monday looks like at 6:30am.
CTO. Built the computer vision that learned to recognize a steel beam from forty stories up.
CPO. Translates jobsite chaos into product features without losing the chaos.
CSO. Sold the idea of a "hook brain" to people who had never owned a smartphone for work.
An under-the-hook device, fully certified as a lifting accessory. It carries cameras, sensors, and enough compute to run AI models locally. It identifies materials, counts lifts, measures cycle time, and learns the rhythm of the site.
A dashboard for project managers, foremen and executives. It reconciles the live activity on the hook with the planned schedule, and tells you - politely or otherwise - where the slip is.
A purpose-built workflow for steel erectors. Crews don't change a thing. The system watches, counts, and produces pace reports that look suspiciously like the ones the PM had been guessing at for years.
It would be easy to dismiss any construction-tech story as a deck-with-pictures. Versatile has receipts. On a single Sellen Construction project in the Pacific Northwest, CraneView helped the team make up five weeks of schedule - five weeks being roughly the difference between a happy owner and a litigated one. Sellen signed an enterprise agreement on the spot.
Austin Commercial's deployment at the University of Houston Law Center pushed daily crane picks up 53% and daily crane time up 28%. The numbers come from the customer, not the vendor, which in construction is the only kind that counts.
Versatile's stated mission is to help construction professionals make faster, smarter, data-driven decisions that improve productivity and safety. In practice, the mission is sneakier than that. It is to convert a famously analog industry into one that argues with data instead of seniority.
The partners list reads like an endorsement letter. Procore - the dominant project management platform - chose Versatile as an integration partner. The Crosby Group, the gold standard in lifting hardware, manufactures CraneView. Turner, Austin, Sellen and most of the leading steel erectors use it. The endorsements are unglamorous and quietly definitive.
The construction industry is short several million workers in the US alone. Project timelines slip. Materials get lost. Insurance premiums climb. Owners pay penalty fees for delays that almost nobody can fully reconstruct after the fact. Every one of those problems is, at its core, a data problem.
Versatile's wager is that the data which fixes them already exists - it is just hanging in the air, swinging over the foreman's head, waiting to be written down. The company that writes it down first owns a meaningful slice of how the world gets built.
It is, in fairness, a slightly ridiculous claim - that an unassuming sensor pod under a hook could change a trillion-dollar industry. But sometimes the most powerful infrastructure is the kind nobody bothers to look up at.
By 6pm the crane is parked. The crew is gone. The tarps are still flapping. Under the hook, the box is still recording - the last few cycles of the day, the slight delay in the afternoon, the unaccounted minute when a load went up but didn't come back down. Somewhere a PM is looking at a phone, eating dinner, learning what happened on the steel at 4:42pm.
The building doesn't know it's been listened to. Versatile is fine with that.